AN EXPERT on childhood medicine has slammed part of the plans to build a specialist emergency hospital in the North East.

In the £200m proposals, health chiefs want to transfer all serious emergency care cases from North Tyneside and Wansbeck general hospitals to a new centre near Moor Farm roundabout, Annitsford, Cramlington.

Serious emergency care, consultant-led maternity services and special care baby units will be moved from the two hospitals to the acute care site.

But Prof Sir Alan Craft, former president of Royal College of Paediatrics, said the proposals for the restructuring of children’s services in the region was concerning.

He believed it would be difficult to staff paediatric services at the new hospital due to a shortage of doctors and nurses. He said he felt it would be better for the region’s general hospitals to work with the new Great North Children’s Hospital, Newcastle.

Prof Craft, a consultant paediatrician based at the RVI, and his wife Anne, children’s nurse and director of nursing and former health visitor for North Tyneside, sent a letter to the Chronicle outlining their views.

It says: “We welcome the proposals to strengthen emergency care for the population of the area and this is clearly a real opportunity to give children and young people what they need and deserve, the best possible care.

“The present proposals to develop in patient emergency services for children in Cramlington goes against all current guidance and defies common sense.

“One of us has spent the last 10 years involved at a national and international level in the reorganisation of paediatric services to make them fit for the 21st century taking into account all of the pressures and drivers such as changing patterns of illness and workforce shortages.

“The proposals from Northumbria fail to recognise this opportunity and if the plans go ahead our children will be condemned to second rate services for the foreseeable future.”

Dave Evans, medical director for Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, countered: “We are proposing to treat the children we currently care for in the new emergency care hospital. This will improve services for these children.

“Professor Craft has not been directly involved in any of these discussions so we are somewhat surprised and disappointed at his decision to make these assertions, which we refute.”

Over the past three months there has been a public consultation on the proposals of the new hospital.